News flash

Of course the Republicans won't lift a finger to prevent anyone from accessing deadly weapons, after all. Why miss out on a fantastic opportunity to slander, demonize and demean an entirely fictional opposition before pressing for further restrictions on free expression and political speech in order to cement their own power? 

Surely the AI gold rush is about much more than just quirky digital pets or the odd deepfake video. What the tech companies and captains of industry, along with their allies in Washington, seem to be envisioning is a "safe", sanitized world where the children of tomorrow "create" endless cratefuls of vacuous digital goo from pre-approved, pre-digested or revisionist content that is not only factually inaccurate but has been systematically scrubbed of any reference to real human pain or suffering or the inconvenient facts of history, especially if inflicted by governing bodies on historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups - if they are even mentioned at all. The 'if's, appearing here in a kind of lurid inversion of the 1968 film directed by Lindsay Anderson, lay bare the rotten common thread running through the entire warp of far-right politics and much of "conservative" thought in general: The truth is just anything the chap a few rungs up some imaginary ladder to nowhere says it is.  

Meanwhile, the corporate governance strategy is quite clear: Continue to design, manufacture and distribute dangerous, harmful and/or deadly products, including invasive digital surveillance tools and weapons designed for mass murder, in the global marketplace, over the objections of any state regulatory apparatus, effectively enabling and empowering any sufficiently well-financed group, even authoritarian regimes, to wield absolute power in defiance of humanitarian and international law. When inevitably destabilizing effects become too obvious, a different range of products is touted; thus, the problem becomes the solution, and the solution is ultimately further alienation from ourselves amid the breakdown of social institutions and sound governance.

"...The military manipulation of civilian opinion and the military invasion of the civilian mind are now important ways in which the power of the warlords is steadily exerted. The extent of the military publicity, and the absence of opposition to it, also means that it is not merely this proposal or that point of view that is being pushed. In the absence of contrasting views, the very highest form of propaganda warfare can be fought: the propaganda for a definition of reality within which only certain limited viewpoints are possible. What is being promulgated and reinforced is the military metaphysics - the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military. The publicists of the military ascendancy need not really work to indoctrinate with this metaphysics those who count: they have already accepted it."

          - C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, OUP Galaxy Book edition (1959), p. 221-222